At the last conference, in Montreal in 2022, 196 country parties to the UN's Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) agreed to create a benefit-sharing mechanism for the use of digital sequence information (DSI) that include the genetic signature of plants like vanilla. — AFP
CALI: Much of the vanilla that flavours our ice cream today is artificial, derived from the genetic signature of a plant that hundreds of years ago was known only to an Indigenous Mexican tribe.
The plant's sequenced genomic information, available on public databases, was used as the basis for a synthetic flavouring that today competes with vanilla grown in several countries, mainly by small-scale farmers.
